CS348B Final Project Instructions
Proposal Due: Tues May 22th, 11:59PM
Rendering Competition (Demo Day): time TBD, Monday June 11th, Gates B08
Write-up Due: Wednesday June 13th, noon
Late days are not allowed on the final project!!!!
Please create a page for your final project on FinalProjectWriteups. You will need to add your project proposal and your final project writeup to this page.
If you need a partner, make a posting on the INeedAPartnerPage.
Description
For your final project we ask you to produce a realistic image of a real object or scene. The scene or object should be challenging enough to require you to design and implement an advanced rendering algorithm. The final project is your chance to investigate an area that interests you in more depth, and to showcase your creativity. To get an idea of our expectations, check out these descriptions of projects from past course participants (pay special attention to projects from the past 2-3 years). On Monday June 11th, you will present your project to an independent panel of judges as part of the CS348B 2007 rendering competition. Teams creating the best projects (as determined by the judges) will receive exciting prizes! As extra incentive, we are offering a grand prize that includes a free trip to SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego in August. Here are some things to think about following when choosing a project:
What are your goals? Try and phrase this as specific questions that you would like to know the answers to, e.g. How do I model reflection from surfaces with fine geometric structure, such as fur?
- What unique imagery would convincingly demonstrate that you have accomplished your goals? Try and keep this in mind throughout your project, since in computer graphics our work is often judged by the images we make.
- What has already been done in this area? You probably won't have time to completely investigate this, but you should definitely spend some time reading research papers. We can help you with finding appropriate references. When you read a paper, look for what has not been done as well as what is already understood; think about new things that you could try.
- Depending on the scope of your goals, you may want to work in a group. We encourage two person groups; larger groups will only be allowed to take on very, very challenging projects. Does your project split naturally into several pieces? Look for projects where each person's work is separable, and yet everyone contributes toward a shared goal that could not be accomplished individually.
Some Project Ideas
Here are some examples of challenging projects.
Fancy primitives. Implement a class of more complicated primitives from Hanrahan's chapter in Glassner's book. but choose wisely. Quadrics are too simple; deformed surfaces are much more challenging. Recommended are bicubic patches (display directly or by meshing), CSG models, or fractals. Fractals are relatively easy to implement and fun to use. For extra fun, map textures onto your patches or fractals. For lots of fun, try fur modeled as geometry (as opposed to as a volume).
full CSG (legos)
partial CSG (indentations)
Exotic wavelength-dependent effects such as dispersion and thin film effects. We can give you some references.
thin-film interference (prism)
Adaptive stochastic supersampling. Use any sample distribution, subdivision criteria, and reconstruction method you like. Allow interactive control over key parameters of your sampling scheme. In a separate window alongside your rendered image, display a visualization of how many rays were cast per pixel.
Subsurface scattering. Look at Hanrahan and Krueger's Siggraph '93 paper for examples of applying subsurface scattering to plants and faces. For the more ambitious, model the microgeometry of the surface. For example, consider an explicit geometric model of the warp and the weft of cloth, the pits in plaster, the scratches in metal, and the structure of velvet or satin. Ray trace the microgeometry in order to compute the brdf. Look at Westin et al. in SIGGRAPH '92; they describe methods for modeling carpet and velvet.
Shading language. Develop a language for programmable shading formulas akin to (but simpler than) RenderMan's language (Hanrahan and Lawson, Siggraph '90). At a minimum, your language should allow the specification of a shade tree that includes mix nodes driven by textures as in Cook's Siggraph '84 paper on shade trees. Don't spend a lot of time on the interpreter - a simple syntax will do. For extra fun, implement (in conjunction with texture mapping) a nontrivial 2D or 3D texture synthesis method. Examples are spot-noise or reaction-diffusion equations (see the two papers on this subject in Siggraph '91).
Advanced volume rendering. Start by implementing spatially inhomogeneous atmospheric attenuation. Divide each ray into intervals. For each interval, interpolate between the ray's color and some constant fog color based on a procedurally computed opacity for that location in space. Experiment with opacity functions. Once you get this working, try defining a solid texture (probably procedurally) that gives color and opacity for each interval. See Perlin and Hoffert's Siggraph '89 paper on solid texture synthesis and Kajiya and Kay's teddy bear paper for ideas. If you want to make your volume renderer fast, use hierarchical spatial subdivision (e.g. an octree). Volumetric photon mapping is currently not implemented in pbrt. You could add it.
Resources
Your main task should be to implement cool rendering algorithms, rather than spending all of your time modeling a complex scene. However, you do need to provide pbrt with a scene to render! Check the RenderMan resources page for info about the RIB file format. You can convert this file form to a pbrt scene file using the utility rib2pbrt. the pbrt website also has some plugins on its download page that might be useful to you, such as a Maya-to-pbrt scene exporter, and a .obj file reader.
Project Proposal
As a first step you should write a one page project proposal and add it to your project page linked from FinalProjectWriteups. The proposal should contain a picture of a real object or scene that you intend to reproduce. We suggest that you first pick something that you would like to simulate, and then investigate what techniques need to be used. A real object that you can carry around with you is best, but a good photograph or painting is almost as good. In addition to having illustrative pictures, your proposal should state the goal of your project, motivate why it is interesting, identify the key technical challenges you will face, and outline briefly your approach. If you are implementing an algorithm described in a particular paper, provide the reference to the paper. Please list all group member's names clearly at the top of the page, and if you plan on collaborating with others, briefly describe how each person's piece relates to the others.
Here is an example project proposal made by your beloved TA.
The purpose of the proposal is to get everyone organized early, and it will give us the opportunity to provide feedback as to whether we think your idea is reasonable, and to offer some technical guidance, e.g. papers you might be interested in reading.
Rendering Competition
On the day of the rendering competition (see dates at the top of the page), each group will be given 15 minutes to demonstrate their system to the class and rendering competition judges and show some images that they produced. You can show off your images on any machine you see fit. Remember to bring the object/images that you are modeling and reproducing. The goals and technology that you developed should be obvious from the image itself. After all, this is graphics. Keep in mind that you absolutely need to have your rendering done by this date. Late days are not allowed on the final project.
As there is a tendency for these presentations to go long, here's some guidelines on how to prepare for the final presentation so everyone remains entertained and the judges get an adequate impression of your work.
- 1 minute -- Motivation: describe the image you were trying to create, and why the image you are trying to create is both cool and technically challenging
- 9 minutes -- Technical: give a brief description of the algorithms/techniques you implemented in your project. You can assume that the judges probably have heard of the techniques before, and thus want to brief, precise summary of how they were incorporated into your project (how you used to technique to meet your needs). It is often helpful if you can display images contrived to demonstrate that your algorithms indeed work as claimed (test shots, etc). This is also a good time to let the audience know if a technique was tried, and didn't work (again, test images work great here)
- 1 minute -- Show off your final image that you are entering into the rendering competition. Each project may enter only a single image into the rendering competition.
- 4 minutes -- Allow 4 minutes for questions
It is useful (but not required) to get a web page or Powerpoint presentation prepared to keep your presentation organized.
Final Writeup
Your final project writeup should be added to your project page by NOON on Wednesday, June 13th (no late days allowed). The writeup should be roughly 3-4 pages, and contain the following:
- A 2-3 page summary of the algorithms/techniques used to produce your images (use references to academic papers for extra detail). Please highlight how your implementation differed (was a subset of, augmented) the technique described in your references.
- A description of problems encountered (techniques that did not work?) and how they were overcome
- A clear description of what work each team member performed
- A results/conclusions section containing your final images, additional images you didn't have a chance to show on demo day that might be especially cool or good illustrations of your technique
- All images should be attached to your final writeup wiki page and not linked from external websites (we like to archive final project pages).
Please take the time to create a high quality writeup for your project (think about it as writing a tech report you'd like to keep permanently on the web). We will be archiving the final project pages and they will be viewed for years to come.
Example final writeups from recent years:
Rendering Competition Judges
The judges for the rendering competition will be announced shortly.
Grading
The final project will count 1/2 (or more, if based on our judgment, we consider the project truly outstanding) towards your final grade in the course. We will consider strongly the novelty of the idea (if it's never been done before, you get lots of credit), your technical skill in implementing the idea, and the quality of the pictures you produce. Tons of coding does not make a project good. When you are finished with your project you should post the source for your system and any test scenes and images that you have created. As stated above, you are permitted to work in small groups, but each person will be graded individually. A good group project is a system consisting of a collection of well defined subsystems. Each subsystem should be the responsibility of one person and be clearly identified as their project. A good criteria for whether you should work in a group is whether the system as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts!
The final project can be a lot of fun. Good luck!